Dropbox Accidentally Unlocked All Accounts for 4 Hours

Dropbox Accidentally Unlocked All Accounts for 4 Hours

The most security related bungle of Dropbox is linked to the title of this post (which is also the title of the blog entry reporting the problem. There have been other ones recently where it has been documented that their terms of service (relative to security) were, at best, ambiguous if not misleading. I am looking at whether to stay with them or not. They don’t meet my security requirements for some content (like student grades) and I have been using a “treat the secret content special” while using Dropbox for the routine. I really like the concept and the user side is quite intuitive and friendly but at some point, the security bobbles become “risks” of more bobbles rather than one-off problems.

I have looked at SpiderOak. It too will sync between the machines with the encryption done (and maintained) as the information moves the cloud. The service model is a bit different with more options making it better geek-wise and more confusing user-wise. Initial playing suggests it feels a bit slower than dropbox but on a 300MB file it actually beat drop box to a complete sync.